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Over 25 per cent of car traffic in Norway is to be removed. The Norwegian Environment Agency (Miljødirektoratet) understands that this requires measures even against battery-powered cars. At the same time, the number of inhabitants is increasing.
This is, of course, no surprise to informed people, and the problems have been foreseen by many for years, including by Document.
The Norwegian Environment Agency has issued a report concerning how Norway is to reach these self-imposed climate targets, writes Nettavisen.
The goal is to reduce all car traffic, including that consisting of electric cars. At last the bureaucrats have discovered that electric cars are absolutely not emission-free: they have to be constructed, after all, and much of the power for battery cars comes from coal-fired power.
In other words, Norwegians are expected to cycle, try to find a bus, or walk. They want to kill car traffic, at the same time as Statistics Norway (SSB) estimates that Norway will gain almost 600,000 more inhabitants within a few years. These are people who, statistically speaking, are not exactly a net contribution to the country.
– Directly anti-car
The motorists’ organisation KNA reacts strongly. Communications and public affairs representative Tor Valdvik is fairly clear in tone.
– The proposals in the report are directly anti-car, with clear steps in an authoritarian direction, Valdvik tells Nettavisen.
– It is alarming how detached from reality the goals and intrusive measures Norwegian climate bureaucrats can propose. These intrude deeply into people’s free choice and private property rights, and weaken the legitimacy of climate policy.
But the authorities dream of a country where everyone cycles, walks, or travels by public transport. Economic pressure is the method. As the report states:
– Combined with car-restrictive instruments, such as zero-emission zones, car-free areas, redistribution of road space, reduced speed limits and stricter parking restrictions, possibly in combination with pricing instruments such as tolls, or environmentally differentiated road pricing, this can shift transport demand away from the car.
Among other things, the Norwegian Environment Agency highlights what it calls “transport-efficient land use”, which involves building in such a way that one does not need a car. We have heard this before: we are all to live in bird boxes in the 15-minute city.
But Valdvik says that Norwegians “are bloody fed up with being told which car they are to drive, when they can drive and where they can drive”. He probably has a point.
He believes the entire project is doomed to fail.
– If these measures are introduced, ordinary people’s mobility will be sacrificed on the altar of the climate, and this will in turn affect the credibility and trust in Norwegian climate policy as such.
Progress Party (FrP) figure Bård Hoksrud, who chairs the Transport and Communications Committee (Transport- og kommunikasjonskomiteen) in the Storting, is very critical of the proposed measures.
– I react incredibly strongly. Some of the measures here amount to state control almost at communist level.
One example is the proposal to introduce parking charges on private property. As the report states:
Give municipalities the authority to impose parking charges on private parking spaces.
There are bureaucrats and politicians sitting in Oslo who are making life ever more challenging for those who finance the entire arrangement, namely Norwegian workers and businesses that pay enormous amounts of tax.
The situation will probably worsen, month by month.